By Isaac Massaquoi
In this column last week, I raised a number of issues and asked questions about the extent to which ordinary Sierra Leoneans feel safe as they go about fending for their families and even within their homes when they retire for the evening.
When I picked up the papers at the start of last week, I was greeted by a picture of a dead man probably in his early thirties. The story described him as an armed robber apparently killed by mobs and thrown out on the streets. I have very serious problems with that kind of “justice” and also with the way that paper used the picture. The latter point is not the issue for today. It is worth pointing however that from time to time I have had cause to speak to some colleagues about the use of pictures of people in difficult situations like road accidents and other horrific incidents including killings carried out by mobs apparently in anger.
During the week, I also heard stories about police getting caught up in a gun battle with robbers and the widening of the activities of Neighbourhood Watch groups as a practical step by ordinary people to defend themselves against the ruthless and increasingly bold thieves all over our communities.
On Wednesday night last week, a colleague journalist and lecturer came face-to-face with death at the hands of robbers. James Tamba Lebbie hired an Okada (motor bike taxi) from FBC campus heading home about three hundred yards away at the Lower Faculty Flats area. About one hundred yards from the main taxi terminal on campus, the Okada boy pulled over as if his bike was experiencing technical problems and by the time James realised that something strange was happening, another Okada pulled up to link up with his colleague. They pounced on James who by this time had no option but to fight back as the struggle for his backpack loaded with examination scripts got underway. It lasted close to five minutes.
James was rescued by a passing car. Realising that help could come from the car as it climbed Harry Sawyer Hill the boys jumped on their Okadas and fled. Bruised and tired, James ran home thanking the motorist who came by and ultimately God for saving him from the claws of thieves on Okada who would have used offensive weapons if he had continued resisting.
Another friend of mine once had an encounter with an Okada and he thinks that encounter provided much of the answer to most of the problems of lawlessness among commercial transport operators and Okadas in particular.
My friend’s car was hit by Okada along Circular Road. The Okada boy pleaded with him to drop the case. He vehemently refused, vowing to teach the Okada boy a lesson.
When they finally got to Central Police Station, he was confronted by police officers urging him to drop the matter, as he was “too busy to pursue the matter through the courts.” It turned out not long afterwards that the Okada belonged to a senior police officer attached to that station. The officer was summoned from his office to deal with the problem as my friend insisted on having his case recorded and dealt with in the normal way.
The officer revealed to my colleague that the Okada belonged to him; that he had seven in all. He bought them with money he saved from his tour of duty as a peacekeeper in Darfur, Sudan. He offered to repair my friend’s car just so that his Okada would quickly return to the road.
Now there is nothing wrong with anybody saving money and starting a transport business. And thanks to the peacekeeping effort in Darfur, many police officers have transformed their lives and their families’. It reminds me of a talkative police sergeant I once met at a pub in the east of the city and less than one minute after a colleague had introduced him to me he was telling me about his three-bedroom flat that was almost complete, the amount of new money in his wife’s business, his taxi and Okadas on the roads and how long it would have taken him under something a million times worse than Greek austerity measures to achieve all that on his present salary. So now I get this point about police officers investing heavily in the Okada transport which is now well and truly indispensable to our country’s public transport infrastructure.
I will argue that the dominance of the business by police officers should partially explain why Okadas are so lawless on the country’s roads. Those whose job it is to keep everybody in line on the roads, have a vested interest in the Okada boys riding in any manner possible as long as the take-home target is met on a daily basis.
As a nation, we have to confront this uncomfortable reality that Okadas are now more than the innocuous transport to move people around. The Okada business has been infiltrated by hard-core criminals who are busy distressing people on a daily basis. Before you accuse me of shouting so loudly now because I have been directly affected with the attack on James Lebbie, I urge you to spare a thought for those who were unable to fight and get out of the net alive like James. The police should have a record of people who have been attacked and injured or even killed by Okada riders. Some of the riders have also suffered at the hands of criminals. And that should be put on record too.
The Okada involved in this incident on Mount Aureol came from Model Junction where they operate freely under the noses of the police. More than half those Okadas are not properly registered. The police know this and I challenge them to prove me wrong. They have an Okada union on the ground but they are only interested in collecting money from the Okada-riding thieves. Look at that chaos at Model Junction. Are the police telling us they have no idea how to deal with that mess? This is the perfect breeding ground for criminals.
It’s a dangerous and even unfair thing to make generalisations about people when such incidents occur but what happened to James was not an opportunistic attack. It was well planned and executed. I have heard of more than a dozen such attacks on people I know personally in, particularly, Bo and Kenema.
When I recently criticized police response to such crime situations, somebody told me I was a little harsh with the constabulary force. I probably was, but how else can you explain this? The attack on James took place about one hundred yards from the FBC security post, which is only seventy yards, or so, away from the police post. The police post itself represents a medieval attempt to tackle 21st century criminal tendencies.
There are hundreds of staff and their families, and close to five thousand registered students on campus. Yes most of the students don’t reside there but they spend the better part of their day on Mount Aureol. The former private road leading to the campus is now worse than the Lumley Junction to Malama route to the far west of Freetown in terms of disorganisation and criminality. College facilities, including lecturers’ living quarters, are being burgled with amazing rapidity by sometimes well-armed thieves. Yet the police station remains the same small building with about four regular police officers who undertake no beat patrols because they don’t have the numbers and equipment.
FBC campus is one of the few university campuses in the world hosting such amount of people without a CCTV operation at least in sensitive areas of the college. Isn’t that the main reason the authorities are sometimes unable to conclusively pick out and deal with riotous students and thieves who roam the campus freely?
Let’s confront the uncomfortable reality once again that the police are doing badly in terms of securing the people and their property. Crime and the fear of crime are real issues people grapple with daily. There is nothing like total security anywhere but I make the point again that in Sierra Leone, we are not used to running away from the streets as early as 7pm just because we are afraid that beyond that, we could be vulnerable to marauding 20-year-olds. The government has provided vehicles to the police. We are waiting to see if they will be put on the beat or assigned to the big men of the force as personal property.
The point is, more and more police officers are graduating from Hastings but we can hardly see them on the beat. No matter how professional and equipped they are, police officers must be seen in our backyards for us to feel re-assured.
